


my fingers curl; they're talons now

by celaenos



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Codependency, Dark Fantasy, F/F, Fic Exchange, Non-Explicit Sex, One Shot, Road Trips, Survival Horror, petrova doppelgangers are the only thing i care about
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:47:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25076371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celaenos/pseuds/celaenos
Summary: There is a world where, on a stifling hot day in July, Elena doesn’t look into her bedroom mirror and find her own face glancing back from the window behind her. There's a world where she goes about her day, meets some brothers, and has her life altered all over again. There is a world out there where Elena doesn’t suck in a sharp breath and whip her head around in a panic. There is a world where it’s nothing more than her own reflection.But not here. Here, it’s flesh and blood and speaking in a throaty drawl from a copy of her own mouth.
Relationships: Elena Gilbert/Katherine Pierce
Comments: 23
Kudos: 69
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	my fingers curl; they're talons now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).



> i hope this is close to what you were hoping for! my idea for what i thought it was going to be changed a lot but i had a really good time writing this<3

Elena’s father used to read her stories aloud every night. It was something that she cherished even long after she could have claimed to be too old for it, could read on her own. But, still, she walked into his study nearly every night with a book underneath her arm and two mugs of tea. They traded off on who got to pick the tale; Elena favored fairytales and her father favored science fiction stories.

His favorite had always involved parallel universes. Worlds where one small choice shifts everything entirely and the players are forever off onto a different track. A flip of a coin: heads, the hero lives; tails, the hero dies—or becomes a delivery boy instead.

It’s the first thought that enters her mind on the bridge; _there is a world out there where this never happens at all_. But here, the tires screech, her mother screams, the car flips, and Elena holds her breath and thinks _somewhere, this doesn’t happen._

It’s a comforting thought, during the funeral, while she watches Jenna have breakdowns in the middle of the night after she thinks they’ve gone off to sleep, as people stand at their door looking at them full of pity and giving them more lasagna than any three people could ever possibly eat. Elena’s heart thrums: _there is a world out there where they are still alive._

There is a world where, on a stifling hot day in July, Elena doesn’t look into her bedroom mirror and find her own face glancing back from the window behind her. There's a world where she goes about her day, meets some brothers, and has her life altered all over again. There is a world out there where Elena doesn’t suck in a sharp breath and whip her head around in a panic. There is a world where it’s nothing more than her own reflection.

But not here. Here, it’s flesh and blood and speaking in a throaty drawl from a copy of her own mouth.

Elena turns around and _stares_ because her face is—not human, it _can’t be_. Elena can’t be both standing here in front of the mirror and crouched in her windowsill at the same time. Nothing that she’s read with her father has prepared her for _this_. There isn’t enough about her face that’s different, exactly, there’s nothing there that Elena could point to, except to say that it’s _wrong_. A flesh and blood image of herself tilts its head to the side appraisingly and slinks its way into the bedroom and Elena feels her stomach bottom out as she chokes on air. Elena’s gasp goes watery and her nostrils close up, like she’s just driven by roadkill that’s been splayed out on the highway, stumbled onto the smell of something gone rotten. The mirrored woman saunters up close and lifts a finger to caresses Elena’s cheek and she freezes in her spot, one of those things that go straight past rational thought to primal revulsion. She couldn’t scream out for help even if she wanted to, she wouldn’t even know how to explain her terror.

“Interesting,” the woman says. She draws the word out, letting her tongue roll slowly over every syllable in a deep throaty sound that sends a shiver running down Elena’s back. The woman places her other hand there immediately, pulling Elena into some sort of fucked up embrace and pressing their hips together.

“How is this possible?” Elena whispers. “How do we look exactly alike?”

The woman smirks wider and releases Elena’s body, making a slow circle around her as Elena tries not to pass out or start crying. When she finishes, pausing directly in front of Elena again, her mouth twists slightly—it’s nothing like a smile. “You’re asking the wrong questions,” she admonishes. “But for starters, you can call me Katherine.”

She _curtsies._ A slow, half-mocking, half genuine dip of a thing that the logical part of Elena’s brain, the part that’s not just _screaming,_ tells her that Katherine has practiced this motion many times before.

“I can _call_ you Katherine?” she asks. “Is that your name?”

“It is now,” Katherine shrugs. Elena watches as she flops herself down on top of Elena’s bed with far more grace and precision than Elena has ever managed, and then crosses her legs. Head tilted to the side again, that smirk reappears. “And we have a lot to talk about.”

…

…

Elena absorbs the information in a daze. _Vampire. Mikaelson. Blood itual. Doppelgänger._ None of it makes any sense. She’s always been smart, always liked school, always enjoyed learning, but the information goes in one ear and gets fuzzy. It doesn’t stick all the way; Elena keeps having to ask Katherine to repeat herself, watches as the thin press of her lips disappears the more annoyed she grows and quickly starts to think better of it. A strange sort of laser focus wafts over Elena, the way it sometimes will when they’re learning a new cheer routine—her body and brain perfectly matched to suck up the information somehow, her muscles just taking it in on autopilot.

Elena rolls the word _doppelgänger_ around on her tongue when Katherine leaves—back out the same way she came in. Hours later, Elena grabs her laptop and Googles it.

_A double._

_A ghostly counterpart of a living person._

Elena had studied Katherine as she spoke. There were curls to her hair, her voice was deeper, more sensual and hypnotic. She knew how to move in her own body, how to twist it to her advantage where Elena often feels like she is still the gangly fifteen-year-old who had suddenly shot up four inches and grown breasts on most days. The differences on the surface seemed minuscule to the differences in the way that Katherine moved and spoke, her eyes boring into Elena’s with both urgency and frustration.

The frustration wins out. Katherine moves from Elena’s bed to her body in the blink of an eye, palm around Elena’s throat with a squeeze, and fangs out as Elena shakes, waiting for the death that should have come two months earlier.

It doesn’t come this time, either.

Katherine leaves her, shaking and alone with a head full of too many questions.

…

…

Elena tries to pull information out of Jenna the next morning, dropping hints about adoption and waiting to see her reaction. Jeremy looks over at her like she’s finally lost it, but Elena catches the way that Jenna swallows uncertainly and sips her coffee too quickly, choking on information that never should have been hers to deliver in the first place.

Elena takes pity, stops pressing down on the wound, pulls a smile, and wraps herself around Jenna, changing the subject with ease.

Katherine only ever shows up whenever she feels like it. Everything is on her time, on her leisure, even though it concerns Elena’s mortality more than her own. Elena decides early on that she hates Katherine and doesn’t trust her; the feeling appears to be mutual, but Katherine keeps on coming back anyway. Katherine gives her a necklace to protect herself, the blood directly out of her veins to heal Elena’s leg when she falls in the woods—out searching for clues on her own. She keeps showing up and protecting Elena, even as she grumbles about it.

The first time that Elena hurts herself enough to warrant needing vampire blood to heal, Katherine rolls her eyes and _tsks_ at her—playing up the caricature of a big sister—before biting down on her arm and shoving it unceremoniously at Elena’s mouth. Not allowing a moment of protest before it’s done. It’s hot; that's the first thing that Elena notices. She chokes with the unexpected taste and the sting of pain radiating from her leg. The warm sensation shifts to a sticky, thick coppery taste that almost has her bending over to retch on instinct, and then the arm is gone and the pain disappears and Elena is just a girl with blood on her mouth, looking back up at a copy of herself.

“Why do you keep coming back here?” she asks. She hates the desperate way that it comes out of her throat. She hates how pathetic and young she feels in response to Katherine.

“Because you’re just stupid enough to go out and get yourself killed.” Katherine drops Elena back into the dirt and rises, smoothing her hair and stalking through the forest, a dismissal if there ever was one.

…

…

It takes a few months before the threat starts to feel real.

Elena goes back to school in the fall, tries not to take Caroline’s comments or Bonnie’s hovering personally and throws herself back into a routine. The problem is, her own skin doesn’t even feel like it belongs to her anymore. She feels stretched too tight, pulled around a corpse that should be decaying at the bottom of a river, that died hundreds of years ago, that perhaps never even should have existed in the first place. She doesn’t know how to explain any of this to Matt, and she had been trying to find a kind way to break up with him even before the accident. Thankfully, that conversation goes about as smoothly as two seventeen-year-olds can make it, and about a month into the school year, they’re back to being friends in a way that feels almost normal.

People start getting “attacked by animals” in suspicious ways, Bonnie realizes that her Grams wasn’t just a kook who was full of shit and has _actual magical powers,_ and Elena finally catches onto the fact that there is a hell of a lot more hidden about her town than she ever considered.

They get stupid with it, because as much as Elena likes to consider herself mature and someone who makes smart decisions, she’s still a seventeen-year-old girl. Vicki Donovan disappears, and Bonnie learns to use some of her powers, and Caroline insists on a mission to go look for Vicki on their own—some desperate grasp for control that Elena doesn’t fight against.

It backfires so spectacularly that Elena might be almost amused if she weren’t so horrified. Vicki is dead, that much becomes apparent very quickly. Matt and Tyler are off a few feet ahead of them, and Caroline slips on something that turns out to be Vicki’s hair. Elena freezes in horror as Caroline scrambles, screaming in a pitch that Elena didn’t know was possible as the boys and Bonnie run for them. Elena snaps back into action seconds before the boys reach them, yanking a hysterical Caroline up into her arms. There’s blood on her hands and in her mouth and she’s screaming and trying to get as far away from the body as she can—practically crawling up Elena. Bonnie quickly realizes what is happening and turns around to grab Matt, shoving him back so that he can’t see Vicki.

Elena knows intimately by now that pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, and then compressing it again. It feels like both hours and only seconds before they’re in the police station with Matt crying into Caroline’s mother’s arms, Jenna running frantically towards Elena. When she finally crawls into her bed, sometime around three a.m., Katherine is waiting for her, fuming.

“I told you to _stop,_ ” she hisses, almost directly into Elena’s mouth.

“You won’t _tell me anything_ ,” Elena retorts, beyond done with Katherine’s cryptic shit. “You keep on talking about some stupid curse but you won’t actually give me any information that means anything!”

Katherine shoves her down onto the bed. Before Elena can do anything about it, Katherine is straddling her, a hand pressing around Elena’s throat. “I don’t owe you anything,” she bites. The way that she says it sounds almost like she is trying to convince herself, not Elena. It’s the first hint of humanity that Elena finds underneath the stalking, sultry, demanding woman and she latches onto it, perhaps desperately. “Do what I say,” Katherine demands. “Or die, it doesn’t really matter to me one way or the other.”

“I don’t believe you,” Elena says, because her very presence here assumes otherwise. Katherine’s eyes flash dangerously and then she laughs, sending an intoxicating fluttery feeling down Elena’s spine. 

She leaves as quickly as she always does.

…

…

Caroline gets into a car accident, not even a full day later. Elena and Bonnie go to visit her and bring her magazines and paint her nails and try not to talk about the Vicki elephant in the room but there is something… off about all of this.

When they leave, Elena tries to contact Katherine. She never left a number, she just… shows up when Elena seems to need her.

So.

Elena goes and does something incredibly stupid.

She walks to the bridge. She hasn’t been back there since that night, avoiding it like the plague, unable to deal with the implications, but, she trusts her instincts, and there is too much that Katherine isn’t telling her. 

Elena walks to the edge, stares down into the murky water, and tries (and fails) to control her breathing. She can feel her body responding to this place, her heartbeat quickens, she squeezes her palms together and closes her eyes. _It’s just a bridge. It’s just some water._ Elena holds one leg out, balancing on one foot and hovering above the dark water, eyes closed, body in a full panic. She takes a deep breath, and jumps.

Arms yank her back roughly.

“What the _hell_ did I tell you?” Katherine snaps, angrier than Elena has ever seen her.

“Something’s wrong with—” Elena starts, but Katherine immediately cuts her off.

“I didn’t pull you out once only for you to jump in and drown all over again! _Christ!”_ Katherine drags Elena down the road, not an ounce of gentleness to her grip or her words.

“What?” Elena gasps.

Katherine ignores her. “There are vampires back in town now. Your friend died from a vampire attack and there isn’t anything that you can do about it. _Get over it._ Stop digging. _Make your friends stop digging._ Klaus is going to catch wind of you if you don’t _stop being so stupid!”_

“What do you mean you pulled me out before?” Elena demands.

Katherine ignores her, lifts her up, and runs back to the Gilbert house. Depositing Elena roughly into her bed again, she just glares down at her furiously. “Stop trying to get yourself killed, it’s pissing me off.”

She leaves, and Elena screams into her pillow until her throat is sore.

…

…

Vampires are killing people, Bonnie is a witch, Tyler is a _werewolf,_ and Elena has a doppelgänger running around, manhandling and occasionally impersonating her.

None of them knows how to help Tyler. His temper has always been snap-quick, and in the middle of a party at his parent’s house, he shoves someone needlessly, and then it’s just… over. Just like that: a drunk shove and for the rest of his life, every bone in his body is going to break and rebuild once a month. Elena is horrified, doesn’t know how to help, doesn’t know what to do about _any of this,_ and Katherine won’t tell her anything worthwhile.

When she goes home that night, Jenna is up late, hunched over her books, and groaning about her thesis. Elena makes her a cup of tea, kisses her forehead, and offers to help. This is something that she can actually do.

“You’re the best,” Jenna grumbles as Elena scours through her textbook for a fact that Jenna only half remembers. Elena gives her a half-hearted smile. “Hey,” Jenna says, suddenly serious. “Everything okay?”

Elena considers asking Jenna about her birth parents again. Considers asking her if she knows anything about all of the supernatural beings lurking on the edges of their town, considers asking why she was fooled by Katherine imitating her three weeks ago, and then dismisses all of it. She pulls a smile and shakes her head.

“Nope, all good over here.”

Jenna frowns but then Elena finally finds the date that she was looking for and distracts Jenna once again, leaving a snack in her wake as she slips upstairs.

…

…

Katherine grows bolder at the same time that Elena does.

Elena just starts actively searching for information on Klaus and Katherine flips her shit. She impersonates Elena and flirts with Matt. Impersonates Elena and gets in a fight with Bonnie. Impersonates Elena and nearly snaps Jeremy’s neck. Escalating the situation just enough that Sheriff Forbes thinks that Elena is vandalizing school property and scolds Jenna for half an hour.

Elena screams into her pillow, punches a mirror, and cuts herself, cursing and wincing at the blood pooling on her knuckles. She stares down at it, wondering what it would feel like to survive on that alone, her stomach rolling. She feels like she is going crazy, but she picks up one of the broken pieces of the mirror and holds it in her palm, staring up at the now fractured image of herself. Katherine can fool almost anyone with just some makeup and a few adjustments. There’s nothing inherently about Elena anymore that is a distinction of her and her alone. Without thinking about it, Elena takes the piece of the glass and makes an inelegant cut on the top of her left thumb. Blood immediately pools. Bright, painful, and deep red. Elena hisses and shoves the thumb into her mouth, tasting copper as she panics and instantly regrets her choice—it remains sore for days because she cuts just a bit too deep—but she needed _something._ Something to make her feel like she wasn’t going crazy, to make her feel like herself. A real person and not just a copy or an echo of someone who should have been dead for centuries.

Jenna panics when she sees the cut, two days later in the kitchen—Elena had been avoiding her wrath as best she could. It’s still more painful than it should be, and she probably should have gone and gotten stitches, but instead, Elena carefully cleans it, mumbles something about cooking, and keeps it bandaged and low and out of their sight until it heals over enough to avoid complicated questions.

Nearly three weeks later, all that’s left is a scar; a jagged ugly pink thing that is hers and hers alone. Sometimes at night, Elena rubs it against her finger, feeling the groove in her skin that proves she is different from Katherine.

…

…

Elena sits numbly on her front porch. _Jeremy is dead. Jenna is dead._ She rolls the thoughts around in her brain, trying to force them to make some sort of sense, but they don’t. Her brother and aunt are both dead, and she doesn’t know what to do. For perhaps the first time since Elena met her, Katherine isn’t smug. She’s not _gentle_ either—nowhere close—but there’s a quiet kind of understanding in her eyes as she paces the length of the porch. She won’t shut up about packing her bags and taking Elena as far away from this goddamn town as possible, but Elena can’t _think._

Because her whole family is dead.

Jeremy and Jenna are dead and this time—even more so than before—it feels like it’s entirely her fault.

Elena suddenly feels her stomach revolt and she lurches forward and retches into the dirt, coughing and shaking as Katherine grimaces and steps back from her.

“Don’t be disgusting,” Katherine admonishes. Elena wishes that she was strong enough to reach up and gouge her eyes out. Instead, she screams into the night. Elena lets out a howl—there is no other way to describe it—she tilts her head back and something comes up from inside of her, so powerful and sad that she almost falls over. But suddenly, Katherine is griping her shoulders and holding her up, her hand never wavers, holding Elena firmly in place. For one millisecond, it feels like maybe Katherine isn't just holding Elena in place, but she's using Elena to keep herself up, too. Klaus Mikaelson has been trying to kill Katherine for five-hundred years, and she stayed and tried to save Elena’s remaining family. She’s still here.

_That has to count for something._

Elena chokes again, spitting the awful taste from her mouth as Katherine makes a noise of disgust and steps away from her again. “You shouldn’t stay here,” she warns.

A strange, intense feeling rises from inside of Elena, like the moment after the moment when you realize that you're dreaming; when you realize that you haven't woken up yet and that maybe, you can decide what happens next. Elena shoves herself up onto shaky legs and walks with determination into the house. She finds a box of matches and lights it. Elena takes one last look at the place where she grew up and then drops the match.

“Well… that’s one way to go about it,” Katherine drawls from the doorway.

…

…

Elena waits in the car while Katherine does something to make it seem like Elena died in the fire. It probably won’t stave off the Mikaelsons for long, but it might buy them a little time. As she drives past the Mystic Falls town line, Katherine holds her arm out. “Want me to turn you?” she asks. “Only real way to solve all our problems.”

“No,” Elena says, shoving her hand away. “I don’t want to die. That’s the point.”

“It’s the only way out of this mess that I know of,” Katherine tsks.

“ _Are_ you out?” Elena retorts. “It’s been five-hundred years and you’re still running from him. How has this actually helped you?” she waves her hands in Katherine’s general direction, taking note of the way that her lips thin in anger.

“I’m not dead, am I?”

“Technically, _aren’t_ you?”

“God, you’re annoying.”

“So are you,” Elena responds, very maturely. Katherine smirks and hits the gas, speeding into the night in a terrifying way that keeps Elena on edge for over two hours.

It’s not that she hasn’t thought about it—it’s rattled around in her brain ever since the moment Katherine slipped into her bedroom and said the word vampire. It’s just not what she ever would want out of her life; it’s _counterintuitive_ to everything that she _does_ want: a family, a life, to grow old someday.

Though, as she speeds down the highway, her family and home nothing more than ashes in her wake, she supposes that _nothing_ in the last year has been what she could have ever wanted.

So—

Elena looks down at Katherine’s offered arm and says nothing.

…

…

They leave the United States entirely—Elena’s first time—and despite all of the grief and anger that’s stored up inside of her, Elena stares at all of the buildings and the bustle in childlike fascination.

They don’t stay in one place for more than a few days at a time. Elena doesn’t know how, but for someone who is loyal to no one but herself and has been on the run for the last five-hundred years, Katherine seems to have contacts everywhere. Any whiff of the name _Mikaelson_ and Katherine grabs Elena and gets them as far away as possible, grumbling about how annoying and inconvenient Elena’s very humanity is in how quickly they can disappear.

They’re in Kraków, Poland, when Elena is trying to both walk and listen to the hourly trumpet song one last time as they scramble to the airport. Word of Klaus descending on them had Katherine shoving Elena out of the hotel room in half a breath. Elena bumps into a tourist and stumbles, nearly face planting onto a cobblestone. Katherine yanks her up so roughly, there’s a deep purple bruise on Elena’s shoulder for a week. “Stay with me,” she says, attempting to sound annoyed, but there’s a tremor in her voice that betrays other emotions. Elena turns her gaze forward and keeps pace, sticking to Katherine’s side like glue.

Elena watches Katherine feed on people and cannot imagine doing it herself. She cannot imagine _dying,_ forever stuck as a seventeen-year-old. A life on the run with no one but a copy of herself doesn’t sound like much of a life at all.

But—

She can’t imagine anything else anymore, either. For all intents and purposes, Elena Gilbert died in a house fire along with her aunt and brother. Elena reads her own obituary on her phone from a café in Berlin; it’s one of the most surreal feelings in the world. Elena Gilbert is never going to be older than seventeen, frozen in time as a teenage girl who’d never left her small town, lost her family to tragedy, then succumbed to it herself. She’ll never be anything else.

Just like Katerina Petrova.

Elena asks her about it, once, on a night where she’s had a little too much rum and is feeling equal parts melancholy and brave. They’ve been on the run together for going on four months, now. Elena thinks they’re in Johannesburg, but she stopped bothering to try and keep track at least a month ago—everything slips by in a hazy blur with Katherine making all of the decisions. As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Elena knows that she’s fucked up. Katherine’s eyes go dark when Elena asks about her mother. There’s a flash where Elena thinks that Katherine is finally going to just snap her neck and be done with it, but she doesn’t. Instead, she yanks the bottle from Elena’s hands and walks out of the hotel room, leaving Elena drunk and alone on the bed. She promptly vomits and then passes out.

Over two months later, in São Paulo, Katherine yanks the bite of chocolate cupcake that Elena had been about to eat right out of her hands. Elena yelps in protest, but Katherine merely throws it into the trash with a petty shrug before walking along down the sidewalk. Annoyed, Elena follows behind. They haven’t heard much of Klaus in the last month, but Katherine won’t let her guard down; she won’t let them stay anywhere long enough to take much of anything in. It’s just hotel room after hotel room and Elena wants to tear her hair out.

“Ana,” Katherine says.

“What?”

“My mother’s name.”

Elena stills, the gravity of the situation settling down onto her shoulders. Katherine walks on as she always does, slinking along like a lioness, not looking at Elena.

“It’s pretty,” Elena says softly, noting the inflection that Katherine puts on the name, hints of her native tongue slipping through—in all their stops, Elena has noted that they never once go to Bulgaria. Katherine’s face remains stiff in response, but Elena catches the slightest of nods as she swallows. “How—”

“My father’s name was Rayko, and my little sister was called Ivet,” Katherine adds, like the words have been scrapped from her throat. “I never got to name the baby.” Elena doesn’t know what to say in response and before she can try to conjure up something, Katherine whips around and faces her, Elena jerking to a clumsy stop. “Klaus slaughtered them, too. Same as he’s going to do to you if you don’t make a choice soon. I’m not going to be your babysitter for the next hundred years.”

…

…

Elena doesn’t know what Katherine wants from her.

She doesn’t know what it is that _she_ wants from Katherine, either.

They’re on their third night in Perth when it happens for the first time. They’re sitting on the balcony of their hotel room at night, watching the stars come out, and Katherine looks over at Elena and her eyebrows lift even as her eyes drop, traveling the length Elena’s body in such an unconcealed once-over that Elena has to take a deep, steadying breath. It’s not the first time that Elena has looked over at Katherine and felt a twinge of desire pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin. But it is the first time that it has felt like something more than a passing—narcissistic? incestuous? some form or another of _bad/wrong_ —thought to be dismissed. For the first time in the almost two years that Elena has known her, it feels like something inevitable.

Katherine has lived a long life, knows how to decipher the most minuscule of facial and body clues, and knows _Elena’s_ body nearly as well as her own. She smirks and pushes off out of the chair, twirling and slinking back into the room, all rakish, wicked implication. Elena only hesitates for a moment before following her.

“I didn’t know that you had it in you to be this kinky,” Katherine teases, slowly peeling off her clothes as she struts towards Elena. “What a narcissistic little fantasy,” she whispers, breath kissing Elena’s ear. She starts to say something back in protest, means to reach up and shove Katherine away, and remind her that Elena could say the same of her, but instead, Elena’s cheeks burn as she snaps her mouth shut and folds into Katherine’s arms.

Anger and grief are terrible reasons to go to bed with someone, probably, but when Katherine presses Elena down into the sheets and straddles her, tugging on the thin fabric of Elena’s tank top and roughly ripping it off of her, she starts to understand the appeal; it’s not entirely about anger, maybe, and less about grief than she feels comfortable admitting. Katherine sucks her way down Elena’s neck, fangs out but not in use, as her slim fingers dig into Elena’s hips roughly. Katherine bites Elena at the very moment that she brings her to her first orgasm, sucking enough that when she pulls back, bright red lips full of Elena’s own blood leave marks up and down Elena’s stomach. Katherine forces Elena to taste herself in the next kiss, a mixture of pennies and salt that sends her reeling; the grief and anger long forgotten during this thing they’ve both been building towards. Whether they like it or not, they’re the doppelgängers; two kindred spirits never intended to meet, born hundreds of years apart, yet still, set onto the same paths, the same patterns, forever forced to return and play them out.

She’s been avoiding it, but Elena has known—since the moment that she lit the match and followed Katherine out of Mystic Falls—that she didn’t want to die. She was willing to, if it saved her family, but it didn’t.

It made things worse.

Katherine drops down beside Elena, their mirrored bodies covered in a sheen of sweat and blood. She blows a curl out of her face and rolls her head over to Elena, lips still as blood-red as Elena’s own. “I could snap your neck now and be done with it,” she says, not unkindly.

Here they are, trapped in a small hotel room, forced to discuss their mutual—well, their mutual something. Katherine tips her head to one side, expression slightly less acerbic, but barely, and a sick certainty grows in the pit of Elena’s stomach; they’re not friends, not family, not lovers, not anything more than an echo of tragedy. In another life, they might have never aligned with each other at all, but in this one, the one where Elena’s whole family is dead—they did. Elena and Katherine aren’t any more to each other than the stuff that people desperately grab onto to keep themselves from drowning, both dealing with an absence so loud nobody can speak. Elena rolls her head over to face Katherine head on, nothing more than a piece of driftwood. She slumps back into the large bed to put a few more inches between them.

“No,” Elena whispers. “I don’t want to be a monster.”

Katherine gives Elena a sharp look that says she’s not fooling anyone. “Oh, but darling, you already are.”

…

…

The go back to the States a few months after Elena turns eighteen.

She steps off of the train and everything around them is just a wash of gray; the buildings, the streets, the slushy dirty snow, even the people look like nothing more than blobs of gray, running past them. It feels appropriate to how Elena has been taking the world in for the last two years. Nothing but gray except for the taxi cabs; their muddled dirty yellow is the brightest thing in all of Chicago that Elena has seen so far.

“Klaus always liked Chicago,” Katherine hums. “This will be a fun little ‘fuck you’ moment.”

Elena barely nods, jumping back and forth on the balls of her feet and rubbing her freezing palms together. The air around them is cold and sharp, almost like a physical thing that’s trying to steal the breath directly from Elena’s mouth. Katherine does nothing but glare at her while Elena suffers. Standing on the sidewalk beside Elena with her body held in a coiled sort of stillness, ready to leap forth at the right glance, at an errant thought; the violence under Katherine’s skin is almost tangible in these moments, once Elena had learned to see it.

“Good a place as any, I guess,” Elena shrugs. Katherine stalks forward, a little crescent of rueful admission curling at the corners of her mouth.

Elena doesn’t know how one is supposed to prepare to die and be reborn to face the potential of hundreds of years of life. So, she eats one of her favorite meals, savors a cupcake, considers getting very _very_ drunk, thinks the better of it, then walks towards the Chicago River. Katherine follows with only mild complaining about getting mud and snow on her heels.

Elena takes a large swig of the rum that Katherine hands her and stares out at the water. “Will it hurt?”

“Yes,” Katherine says, never one to soften things. “But it’ll be quick. The _dying_ isn’t the hard part,” she warns. “The coming back is.” She sighs and kicks her feet, trying to get the mud off her heels and looking some combination of twelve and twenty and five-hundred all at once. Elena wonders if she’ll look like that, too. Forever young and ancient. She looks up at the stars and closes her eyes, letting the sharp wintery breeze brush over her. There is a world out there where vampires don’t exist. Katerina Petrova raised a daughter alone, but happily and then died at the ripe old age of eighty. Wickery bridge was never more than wood and stone and Elena grew up and took over her father’s practice after he retired, calling him to read tales and ask for advice for the rest of his long life. There’s a world where Jenna and Jeremy are alive and grown, smoking pot together and teasing Miranda into loosening up a little. There is a world where Elena’s home still stands.

It’s not here.

Elena sucks in a deep breath and closes her eyes, the last thing she ever wants to see with her human eyes is the stars. “I’m ready,” she says. It might be the truth, probably, it’s not.

Elena doesn’t have time to process Katherine’s arm at her mouth, the taste of her blood, the rush of the wind as her neck snaps unnaturally to the right. Later, she tells Katherine that she felt it when she shoved Elena into the icy river, but there is probably no way that is true—nothing more than the remnants of a different life, different water, a different death.

All water has memory, though. Later, when Elena comes up sputtering, screaming at Katherine for shoving her in unnecessarily, Katherine sits there calmly on the riverbank, sipping the bottle of rum and ignoring the chill. Elena staggers out of the water, making her way on limbs that feel almost coltish and new before she falls beside Katherine.

She holds the bottle out to Elena. “You’re a monster now, too,” she says. Some part of her that Elena might not have been able to detect an hour ago seems saddened by this fact. “Klaus has no more use for you, you’re free.”

Elena grabs the bottle and chugs it, taking one moment to look back up at the stars before turning to Katherine. _A ghostly counterpart of a living person._ What does it mean if neither of them is alive, anymore? If both of them have turned themselves monstrous in retaliation for the things that monsters did to them? Elena throws the bottle down and rises, she supposes that she’s got a lifetime to figure it out. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she says.

Katherine gazes up at Elena with a look on her face that’s, if not the ghost of a smile, certainly the ghost’s cousin. Elena mirrors it, reaching to press her thumb and finger together, searching for a jagged scar that has disappeared the same as Elena’s old life.

The two of them truly are the same, now. Monsterous mirrors of girls long dead.


End file.
